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Sissy Doutsiou is an actor and director of the Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens, Greece. I'd met Sissy in 2019 when I attended the Athens International Video Poetry Festival, organised by Sissy and the Institute. There was so much to see in that Festival, but I particularly remember being blown away by the intensity of her live performance that I watched. So it was exciting back in April when Sissy approached me to make a film together. It's been a challenging project - a new way of collaborating, the subject matter, and working with two languages. Take a look at the results ... or some screenshots below.
I was fortunate to be invited to present in Panel 12: Remixing the archive – creative digital reimaging, reworking and reuse. I shared the new project that I’m working on with writer Toby Martinez de las Rivas and sound artist Neda Milenova Mirova that uses, and is inspired by, a photographic archive at the Museum of English Rural Life.
This stream aims to set up a discursive space to explore Warhol’s well-known love of repetition paired with Koestler’s seemingly condemnation of repetition. We will seek to theorise, articulate and demonstrate how radical forms of repetition can be creative, transgressive, disruptive, politicized subversion and acts of liberation within themselves."
In my session 'Repetition and Collaging of the Self' I talked about my filmmaking process - 'Repetition at 25 frames per second', alongside Shirley Chubb - 'Repetition as performance: from commemoration to constancy' and Sinead Kempley - 'Mining the same seam, dredging and composting: mythopoetic art practice and discard studies'. And many more presentations over the 2 day conference.
I first understood Haiku through the character of Ricky in the wonderful film Hunt for the Wilderpeople (a film written and directed by Taika Waikiki), and began to enjoy more of them through Dave Bonta. Haibun combines prose with a haiku.
Dave Bonta and MovingPoems.com have been involved with a competition for Haibun, and along with Dave and James Brush, I was invited to be involved in judging the filmmaking stage of the competition. As Dave explained, in his presentation to Haiku North America 2023 in Cincinnatti, where the Haibun films were screened: "Videopoetry (AKA cinepoetry or filmpoetry) is a hybrid of film and poetry that can work especially well with haibun. Like haibun, it hijacks a narrative medium for lyrical ends in a creative subversion of a typical audience’s expectations." It was the first time I've been on the other side of the festival fence as a judge. While the three of us had some different views on what we thought were the strengths of the films submitted, we had a unanimous decision on the winner - Table for One by Matt Mullins.
For a full report on the competition, or to see other films shown at the event - please head over to Moving Poems.
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October 2024
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